Show Me Your Desktop

Guess what time is it? It’s time to share your desktop wallpaper screenshots! Yes, it is a time honored tradition here at Terminally Incoherent. Every once in a while we all take screenshots of our desktop and share them with the internet to see who has the coolest one. You might win, but I think I have pretty strong entries in this competition.

Once again, I don’t have an unifying theme across all my machines. I only managed to get that sort of coordination back in 2007 when I decided that I will have Eva themed wallpapers on all machines. In 2008 and 2010 my backgrounds had no connections.

First up is my Windows box on which I’m sort of continuing tradition of female robot backgrounds:

Windows Wallpaper

The fact that you don’t see a lot of video game shortcuts on the desktop is because 90% of my games now launch via Steam. I even added my non-steam games there, so that I can have access to Steam overlay as I play. No seriously, Steam overlay is probably the best thing about PC gaming – a built in clock, a web browser, and quick screenshots with F12. I can’t play games without that shit anymore. But I digress.

Here is my Mac wallpaper:

MBP Wallpaper

Nice, anime themed background – I have the same one on all desktops to keep it simple. I have no clue if this is from some movie, and I don’t particularly care. I randomly found it one day while browsing the web and it became my wallpaper.

Next up, my work laptop:

Kubuntu Wallpaper

I tried to keep it neutral and work safe on this one – plain backgrounds, tame landscapes or fractal / abstract CGI art are my usual go-to backgrounds. But one day I found these two guys, and they have been my wallpaper ever since. Everyone at work seems to love them.

Finally, iPhone because it is also a computer:

iPhone Wallpaper

Orange, paint splash Half Life symbol. How can you go wrong with that?

Now it’s your turn. Take a screenshot of your desktop, or phone lock screen/wallpaper, upload it to Imgur and post it in the comments. Note that comments with more than 3 links usually are automatically held for moderation, so if that happens to you don’t get annoyed.

@ Morghan:
For some reason that desktop shot cut off the edges, nothing to see there though, just the time and the Win7 start menu. It doesn’t matter the OS, I like to keep my desktop clean unless I’m moving stuff around and there’s a massive dump of random junk on it.

Even my Android home screen (I only have three screens) is a clock widget, calendar widget for next appointment, and ClassBuddy for my next assignments due in uni on the main screen. Google Music widget, Reader unread count, and Financisto 4×1 with a few commonly used app (KeePass, K-9, Camera) shortcuts on screen 2. Screen 3, which I wouldn’t have if my UI didn’t require an odd number of screens, is an Out of Milk shopping list widget.

Well pretty simple. What I need most is in the Taskbar, the rest in the start menu.
The green Clock and Batterystats in the top right are for working in Darkroom which is fullscreen. Sysmetrix is the only program I know that can paint above the Darkroom fullscreen…

Two years ago when you last did this, I didn’t post one because I was using xmonad with no wallpaper. An empty desktop screenshot was literally a light-blue rectangle. I’ve since given up on tiling window managers as being too inflexible too often, instead keeping all the “tiling” to within Emacs (winner-mode) where it’s still useful. I then used Gnome 2 for awhile, until it was stabbed in the back and killed by the monster that is Gnome 3 and Unity.

When that happened, I switched to KDE. I’m still not entirely happy with it; it’s fairly buggy, occasionally flaky, its compatability mode is unusable, and it loses configuration settings all the time. However, I’ve gotten so used to the fuzzy-matching keyboard-entry launcher thing (alt+f1 in KDE, like the Windows key in modern Windows), and the eye-candy, that I like it better than the more-reliable, simpler desktop environments / window managers when it comes to serious, long-term use.

I’m still searching for that perfect desktop environment.

</rant>

Oh yeah, this is supposed to be about screenshots. Here are my two home computers. I keep it simple, using KDE’s fuzzy-matching launcher to start most GUI applications. The wallpaper is set on slideshow and changes every 10 minutes to other scenery images. I look forward to having animated backgrounds soon.

Unfortunately, KDE’s dotfiles don’t seem to be versionable in any meaningful way, so I have to set up and sync settings from scratch/manually for each install. It’s very nearly the default KDE, though, so it only takes a few minutes.

Today’s my Friday off, so I can’t grab screenshots of my work computers today. My work laptop is also identical to the above but my work desktop is actually Gnome 2 (Ubuntu 10.04), though it will be getting switched to KDE next week when I get my new computer (and back to Debian unstable). I’m already at the maximum number of links allowed in a comment anyway (3). :-)

I don’t have a smart phone, and I’ve even considered not owning a cell phone at all but my wife won’t allow it. So no phone screenshots!

Well, I’m a boring chap! I like to keep things simple.
On my main computer, my WM is Wmii – so thats as plain as you can get.
My Ipad has stayed like this since I got it.
My phone is the only thing I’ve really customised. The wallpaper/background is a ‘Live Wallpapper’ that writes out code from a file I’ve given it.

Piccies : http://imgur.com/a/wmYF6#0
(and yes, the second image in the gallery is my computer – if you look at the bottom, there’s something there)

@Morghan : I’ve just looked though your gallery and it would appear that we both used the same site for some of our desktops (back when i used to use a ‘real’ one.
I think I found them after seeing a post on reddit with some nice wallpapers!

Oh and final note – my phone image shows my network as T-Mobile, which it’s not, but I use what ever gives me the strongest signal. (Actual operator is Orange).

You know, these full screen editors ought to have a feature that would display the date/time in your chosen corner. They usually use very wide margins anyway, and a clock is not as much of a distraction.

These animated wallpapers are really cool, but all I can think of is the resource drain on these. :(

I think I know how you feel about Gnome. KDE did that to me few years ago. I upgraded my machine to Ubuntu 10.4 which came with KDE 4.4. The version I had previously had KDE 3 which I absolutely loved. When I booted my machine for the first time and saw 4.4 my exact words were:

“What the fuck is this shit?!”

It’s like they took everything that was good and made it worse:

– Replaced Konqueror with Dolphin which had half the features
– Made the crystal clean UI for mounting USB drives absolutely retarded and buggy
– Desktop widgets… Everywhere! Ugh…
– Runs like a slug in a tar pit

Not a big fan. What version of KDE are you running? Also, what’s that theme? Kinda “windowsy”, but I like it.

Also: get a damn smartphone. How do you live man? I’d be lost without mine – it’s my GPS, calendar, shopping list, digital camera, ebook reader, fact checker and internet browsing device all rolled into one.

two 22″s, 1920×1080 each.
i use windowpager (http://windowspager.sourceforge.net/) it’s not great, and there’s no effects or any eye-candy (if that’s what you’re looking for) but it does the job i need it to do. :)

Here is my phone home screen. It was dead on the end table earlier so I couldn’t include a screenshot of it. I’m still trying to decide if I should keep the quick toggles, change it to the Financisto widget, or put in the sunrise/set and moonrise/set + phase widgets. I know what will go there in August when classes start again, but there’s no reason to take up space with a class schedule when I’m out for the next few months.

Yup, that was exactly my reaction to seeing Gnome 2 replaced. Shocked and disappointed. Being a complete rewrite tossed all the old widgets, no right-click context menus on anything, hard-coded mouse hotspots, complete lack of all customization, inability to shutdown or reboot, non-standard alt-tab behavior, regular crashing (every 10-15 minutes for me due to an alt-` bug), no themes (partly fixed with the tweak tool), hard-coded “accessibility” menu that 99.9% of users don’t ever need, an application launcher that requires a mouse to launch a second application instance, and I could never figure out how to unmount from the GUI without the tweak tool. Ugh.

I’m using KDE 4.7-ish. It’s -ish because the various Linux distributions don’t package the whole thing together at once and you end up with pieces from different versions. I’m using air-oxygen for the window decorations — though you’re not seeing it in these screenshots — and Glassified for the theme. Both are the “most downloaded” in their respective categories in the Add-On Installer, making them easy to find.

I hadn’t used KDE for years so I didn’t even notice KDE4 being way different. I do ignore all the widgets and “activities” junk, so it’s not so bad. I don’t use Dolphin or Konqueror or any GUI file manager; that’s what the command line is for. :-) All the computers I’m currently using are powerful enough that it doesn’t feel sluggish. I was using a couple of 2004-era laptops until December and KDE would only run in its broken compatibility mode (or whatever it’s called), so I wasn’t using it then.

Some year I’ll probably get into smart phones. They just don’t interest me right now. I’m too spoiled by my PC amenities — using tools that I’ve spent years tweaking and mastering — that using a tiny little device without them seems backwards.

I also fell in love with that wallpaper :) The system is pure 64bit Gentoo Hardened with Awesome as its awesome WM. I loathe the whole icons idea from Windows – why do I need shortcuts? I can just go [Win] + R, type the command and voilà… Faster than having to reach for the mouse. But I digress.. Awesome WM let’s me keep my desktop exactly how I want it – minimum desktop clutter, maximum information and speed.

@ Christopher Wellons:
Yes, Gnome Shell (and Unity for that matter) is a huge disapointment… I switched to XFCE at first, but then the guys at Linux Mint released Cinnamon, which recreates a more traditional desktop on the top of Gnome 3.
You can install it in most distros from their repos, but it’s default in LM12 and LMDE.
They also support a fork of Gnome 2 (called MATE) but its future is more uncertain.
Both Cinnamon and MATE are installed in the latest Linux Mint, so you can try both.

My other machines are a vanilla Ubuntu, vanilla Windows 7, vanilla, Android phone, and some work machines. I missed the switchover from Gnome to Unity in Ubuntu, but I’ve recently installed it again and I find I like Unity. I type name of program I want and press . Everythings so simple. I could care less if my launcher is on the bottom or the side and I rarely use the mouse anyway. Haven’t tried Gnome 3.

Hi Luke,
These ducks didn’t freeze. I don’t really know how they do, but I suspect that’s because most palmipedes have very few blood veins in their feet. I liked that each of them is in a couple, but one couple is kind of estranged from each other and the distance is bigger.

@ Christopher Wellons:
You might be interested to know that you can use xscreensaver screensavers as wallpapers by running them in the root window. You just run the individual executables with the “-root” command like so:

Here’s mine, Luke-http://i.imgur.com/hiQhR.jpg
I have 3 monitors in the following config:
1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1280×1024
…courtesy of my Asus EAH 6850 Radeon card with eyefinity.
Its lovely for games like Battlefield 3 and the like.
I use a tool called DisplayFusion to set the screens and rotate them every half hour or so. I have it pointed at a folder with 30-40 space themed pics I ripped off deviantart and wallbase.

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